Allen was already a Capital Radio presenter before hip hop became the centre of his programme. His early-1980s shows moved through jazz, funk and soul. In his own later account, the programme began changing around September 1984, becoming tougher and more urban; within a few months it had effectively become a dedicated rap show.

That timing was crucial. British listeners were trying to follow a culture developing across New York, Los Angeles and other US cities through imported vinyl, films, magazines, club nights and scraps of radio. A mainstream London FM station suddenly giving whole hours to the music changed the speed at which information travelled.

The Capital Rap Show — often remembered through the phrase Allen’s Army on Maneuvers — ran from late 1984 until the summer of 1987. At its peak Allen was broadcasting several nights each week, playing new imports, UK releases, interviews, live sessions and listener charts.

The Friday programme featured the Groove Hip Hop Sales Chart, drawn from sales at Groove Records in Soho. That relationship between specialist record shop and radio mattered: a record could arrive as an import, sell through the shop, be counted on the chart and reach thousands of listeners within days.

Saturday’s Allen’s Army Frontline Chart was voted for by listeners. Fans phoned in their favourite records and heard the result counted down on air. Long before social media, this was a visible feedback loop between broadcaster, record shop, street culture and audience.

Allen also made space for interviews and live sessions with artists including Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix, DJ Cheese & Word of Mouth and many others. The studio became a place where British listeners could hear the culture speaking for itself rather than being translated by an outsider.

In 1985, TDK approached Allen about creating a weekly syndicated programme. He called it National Fresh. Recorded at Radio Luxembourg’s studios in London and carried by local stations around the country, it took the model beyond Capital’s London footprint and gave listeners elsewhere regular access to the same rapidly changing music.

National Fresh also carried Chuck Chill’s New York reports and listener charts, creating another direct line between US developments and British audiences. Allen later remembered the programme as running alongside Capital until his move to LBC, then continuing into early 1988 before sponsorship ended.

The largest physical expression of that network was UK Fresh ’86 at Wembley Arena on 19 July 1986. Allen helped organise and hosted two shows — afternoon and evening — as part of Capital Radio’s music festival with major involvement from Morgan Khan and Street Sounds.

The bill brought a huge cross-section of American hip hop into one British arena: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Word of Mouth & DJ Cheese, Lovebug Starski, Just-Ice and others. Allen’s own later account describes months of transatlantic planning, custom staging, sound and lighting, and the logistical strain of getting an enormous travelling cast through two performances in one day.

Capital recorded the event and broadcast edited performances later that summer. Those tapes became another strand of British tape culture: radio captured live music, listeners recorded it at home, copies circulated, and the event survived because audiences treated broadcasts as archives before anybody called them archives.

That ritual will make immediate sense to anyone who came through rave a few years later. You did not need an official release to decide something mattered. You needed a blank cassette, a decent signal and enough luck not to have the presenter talk across the bit you wanted. Radio recordings were replayed, dubbed for mates and carried far beyond the original transmission area. The technology changed when rave arrived; the instinct to preserve the moment did not.

Allen therefore sits just upstream of the culture Rave Archive documents most heavily. He was not pretending to be part of a rave movement that had not yet happened. He was helping build the habits around underground music — hunting imports, trusting specialist DJs, taping broadcasts and passing discoveries from person to person — that the rave generation would soon take to another level.

Allen moved to LBC in 1987, where he presented talk radio and a Sunday programme about urban music and culture called Street Talk. He later worked across talk and digital radio. But the short Capital hip-hop period remained disproportionately influential because it arrived at exactly the right moment.

Mike Allen died on 4 December 2015 after a period of poor health. The strongest tributes came from people who had been teenagers with cassette decks beside the radio. For them, his show was not background entertainment. It was how the music arrived.

UK Fresh ’86 brought two major hip-hop shows to Wembley Arena in one day. Allen hosted the event and was involved in the organisation alongside Capital Radio and Street Sounds founder Morgan Khan.

It was not merely a concert. It concentrated several strands of the culture in one place: MCs, DJs, electro, turntablism, breaking, imported stars, UK audiences and the radio infrastructure that had taught many of those audiences what to listen for.

Capital later broadcast edited performances over the August Bank Holiday. Those recordings remain some of the most important surviving audio documents of British hip-hop culture in the mid-1980s.